Round-up of fine sentences, part 12
“Give me a Black and White and water,” he heard the waitress say, and Wayne should have pricked his ears at that. That particular drink wasn’t for any ordinary person. That drink was for the person who had created all Wayne’s misery to date, who could kill him or make him a millionaire or send him back to prison or do whatever he damn pleased with Wayne. That drink was for me.
- Kurt Vonnegut
On Page 197 of “Breakfast of Champions”
Wanda owns a dog but she never takes it for a walk. It shits inside. Sometimes she cleans it up, sometimes she doesn’t. Pieces of dried-up dog shit dot the floor of her apartment. But it’s not just the dog shit. Her whole place is a mess: piles of dirty dishes, empty beer cans and wine bottles, unwashed clothes strewn about.
She doesn’t shower very often, either. Every couple of weeks. She smells, but not much given how infrequently she bathes. She’s popular at all the clubs. Men love her. She always has a boyfriend.
Her romances all seem to last about a year. They end with the boy screaming, “You’re gross!”
- Larry Fondation
http://suicidegirlsblog.com/blog/slake-explores-the-concept-of-dirt-and-larry-fondation-tells-us-about-his-dirty-girl/
Three times, (Ryan) Klesko was left holding nothing but a broken bat handle, having shattered two bats fouling off Rivera’s cutter before splitting a third as he grounded out. Some of his Atlanta teammates, moments away from losing the World Series, covered their faces to hide or stifle their laughs, having found comic relief in Klesko’s futility against Rivera’s cutter.
- Buster Olney
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/04/02/sports/baseball-2000-preview-rivera-tops-in-broken-bats-and-broken-hearts.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm
The couple bickered, and John knocked Megan’s cellphone into their large Roman tub. He stormed out. Megan wrapped herself in a towel and rushed after him. In their bedroom she heard something rustle.
“John?”
She tried to open the walk-in closet. Locked. John slid his cellphone to her under the door. She heard a click. Then a loud bang.
“JOHN!”
Megan somehow kicked through the bottom of the door. John was sprawled on his back, the .357 Magnum they’d bought for protection still in his hand. The bullet had passed through his head and punched a hole in the ceiling. Megan called 911, and a dispatcher tried to tell her how to clear his airways of blood.
John’s chest rose and fell, rose and fell, then stopped.
He was 39.
- Ashley Powers
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-vegas-suicide-20120413,0,7514974,full.story
She was in a full panic now—scrambling for a way to revive him. She splashed him with water and started calling his name. He awoke and started screaming. She decided she had to gag him. She tried a towel. She stuffed it in his mouth and wrapped duct tape around his head to secure it, leaving large holes so he could breathe.
She pulled down his pants. She used scissors first. When they didn’t work well, she went looking for the scalpels. To keep him still, she pressed her knee onto his windpipe as she crouched over him. One cut was enough. There wasn’t a lot of blood.
She thought, I am going to take it off and he’s not going to hurt anyone else.
She brought her father’s penis to the stove and turned on the flame. Only the smell of flesh made what she’d done seem real to her. Her stomach lurched. She shut it off, put the burnt organ in a paper towel, and bolted from the house. Later she would throw it under the boardwalk.
She talked to 911 several times, to report what happened and see if he was alive. But by the time the police arrived, there was nothing to be done. The cause of death was asphyxiation. Goodridge had choked on the towel before he’d had a chance to bleed to death from his wounds.
- Robert Kolker
http://nymag.com/print/?/news/features/brigitte-harris-2012-3/
Everything in the world is trying to distract you from getting something on the page. Our own doubts about everything we do is crushing. Don’t let it crush you. No one has any idea what they’re doing. And even J. K. Rowling once lived in her car and her next book will probably be no good anyway. The Great American Novel is inside you, I just know it. Especially if you’re Canadian. Like the David statue in the stone, it’s up to you to release it. And then leave it on a window sill or the M train so I can steal it and take all the credit for it.
- Jim Behrle
http://www.theawl.com/2012/04/how-to-write-the-great-american-novel
Bonus:
This room is almost a temple to timelessness. Caro has worked with the same set of tools since 1966, when he began his first book, The Power Broker, his definitive 1,162-page biography of Robert Moses, the controversial New York planner and builder. For so many writers, for most of them, The Power Broker, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1975,would represent their crowning achievement; for Caro, it was just the beginning. Back then, he and his wife, Ina, lived in a pretty little house in Roslyn, Long Island — he was a reporter at Newsday — and one of the great crumbling neighboring estates had a fire sale. Caro went. He bought a chess set, and he bought a lamp. The lamp was bronze and heavy and sculpted, a chariot rider pulled along by two rearing horses. “It cost seventy-five dollars,” Caro remembers. The chess set is hidden away under a couch in their apartment on Central Park West. The lamp is here on his desk, spilling light onto his galleys. Except for a brief period when he couldn’t afford an office, when Caro worked instead in the Allen Room at the New York Public Library, he has written every word of every one of his books in the same warm lamplight, millions of words under the watch of that chariot rider and his two horses.
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Gottlieb has questioned the veracity of Caro’s reporting only once. There was a single paragraph that stood out on what would become the 214th page of The Power Broker. In it, Bella and Emanuel Moses, Robert’s parents, were depicted at their summer lodge at Camp Madison, a camp for poor and immigrant children that Bella had helped found. There, they were leafing through The New York Times one morning in 1926, Caro wrote, when they learned of a $22,000 judgment against their son for illegal appropriations. Caro included a quote from Bella Moses, who was long dead: “Oh, he never earned a dollar in his life and now we’ll have to pay this.”
How, Gottlieb asked Caro, did he get that quote?
Caro told the story. Moses had instructed friends and close associates not to talk to him. Shut out, Caro then drew a series of concentric circles on a piece of paper. In the center, he put Moses. The first circle was his family, the second his friends, the third his acquaintances, and so on. “As the circles grew outward,” Caro says, “there were people who’d only met him once. He wasn’t going to be able to get to them all.” Caro started with the widest circle, unearthing, among other things, the attendance rolls and employment records from Camp Madison. Now some four decades later, Caro tracked down, using mostly phone books at the New York Public Library, every now-adult child and every now-retired employee who might offer him some small detail about Robert’s relationship with his parents. One of the employees he found was the camp’s social worker, Israel Ben Scheiber, who also happened to deliver The New York Times to Bella and Emanuel Moses at their lodge each morning. Scheiber was standing there when Bella had expressed her frustration with her deadbeat son, and he remembered the moment exactly.
“So that’s how,” Caro told Gottlieb.
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He bristles at the word obsessive, his eyes flashing through his thick, dark glasses. “That implies it’s something strange,” he says. “This is reporting. This is what you’re supposed to do. You’re supposed to turn every page.”
Like the occasion when Caro learned that a college classmate of Johnson’s named Vernon Whiteside was living in a trailer in Florida, but Caro’s source for that information could remember only that Whiteside was living in a town with beach in its name. He and Ina began going through Florida phone directories together, calling every trailer park in every damn Florida town with beachin its name: Boynton Beach, Daytona Beach, Fort Walton Beach…. It was Ina who made the call that found Whiteside, in Highland Beach, and she can still hear the confirmation in her ear. Caro flew to Florida unannounced — “it’s harder to say no to a man’s face,” he says — and knocked on the door. Soon Caro found himself inside, filling notepads with scribbled secrets about Johnson’s cruel collegiate rise, then returned to his hotel to type up another transcript to slip into another file to slip into another drawer.
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It’s important to him that each of Caro’s books looks and feels the same as the previous one and the next. He wants them to be built to last. Unfortunately, book building is another dying art. Bindings are glued instead of stitched; most hardcovers are made from paper rather than cloth; hinges aren’t as sharp as they used to be and half rounds aren’t as tight. “These are just things that have been lost in the march of time,” Hughes says. Today, he looks at books and sees weakness as often as he sees beauty.
He sees it especially in something he calls “mousetrapping,” one of our invisible modern plagues. He opens the three Caro books to demonstrate: Each stays open on his desk. Each lies flat. Hughes then finds a more recent book, and no matter how much he cracks its spine, it wants to snap shut. “It’s like we’re asking readers to close them,” he says. The Passage of Power, Hughes says, will lie flat. He has a printer in Berryville, Virginia, that will make this book the way the others were made. It will be wrapped with the same thick black cloth, stamped with the same gold lettering, printed with the same pleasing wide gutter and colored endpaper. Hughes rises in his chair when he imagines it — he can picture himself opening those heavy cardboard boxes when they arrive from Virginia, hopefully sometime before May. “I’ll be absolutely thrilled. It’s pure joy for me, and it’s never gone away.”
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A few of them, like so many of the men and women frozen in Caro’s files, will not see how this story ends. Nina Bourne, Knopf’s legendary copywriter, died in 2010 at the age of ninety-three, having still come into the office until a few months before her death. Andy Hughes the libel lawyer is now eighty-nine and in an assisted-living facility in Florida.
The others? “Oh, I’ll still be here,” Andy Hughes the book builder says. “I want to see this through.”
“I don’t think that way,” Gottlieb says. “It will be horrible and terrible if this book doesn’t get finished. But people die.”
“You can’t worry about it,” Hourigan says. “You can just go on.”
She goes quiet then, thinking about what she should say next and how she should say it.
“I am so lucky to have been involved with books that are going to live forever,” Hourigan finally continues in her quiet voice. “We’re all this close,” she says, and she holds up her hand, her finger and her thumb just a whisper apart. To what end, she doesn’t say.
- Chris Jones
http://www.esquire.com/print-this/robert-caro-0512?page=all
In his years of working on Johnson, Robert Caro has come to know him better — or to understand him better — than Johnson knew or understood himself. He knows Johnson’s good side and his bad: how he became the youngest Senate majority leader in history and how, by whispering one thing in the ears of the Southern senators and another in Northern ears, he got the Civil Rights Act of 1957 through a Congress that had squelched every civil rights bill since 1875; how he fudged his war record and earned himself a medal by doing nothing more than taking a single plane ride; how, while vice president during the Cuban missile crisis, his hawkishness scared the daylights out of President Kennedy and his brother Robert. Caro has learned about Johnson’s rages, his ruthlessness, his lies, his bribes, his insecurities, his wheedling, his groveling, his bluster, his sycophancy, his charm, his kindness, his streak of compassion, his friends, his enemies, his girlfriends, his gofers and bagmen, his table manners, his drinking habits, even his nickname for his penis: not Johnson, but Jumbo.
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He was always writing, and even then he wrote long. His sixth-grade essays dwarfed everyone else’s. His senior thesis at Princeton — on existentialism in Hemingway — was so long, he was told, that the college’s English department subsequently instituted a rule limiting the number of pages a senior could turn in.
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Caro had a further epiphany about power in the early ’60s. He had moved on to Newsday by then, where he discovered that he had a knack for investigative reporting, and was assigned to look into a plan by Robert Moses to build a bridge from Rye, N.Y., across Long Island Sound to Oyster Bay. “This was the world’s worst idea,” he told me. “The piers would have had to be so big that they’d disrupt the tides.” Caro wrote a series exposing the folly of this scheme, and it seemed to have persuaded just about everyone, including the governor, Nelson Rockefeller. But then, he recalled, he got a call from a friend in Albany saying, “Bob, I think you need to come up here.” Caro said: “I got there in time for a vote in the Assembly authorizing some preliminary step toward the bridge, and it passed by something like 138-4. That was one of the transformational moments of my life. I got in the car and drove home to Long Island, and I kept thinking to myself: ‘Everything you’ve been doing is baloney. You’ve been writing under the belief that power in a democracy comes from the ballot box. But here’s a guy who has never been elected to anything, who has enough power to turn the entire state around, and you don’t have the slightest idea how he got it.’ ”
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“They softened my style,” Caro says. Shawn, on the other hand, had the magazine’s standards to uphold: The New Yorker insisted on its own, sometimes fussy way of punctuating; it didn’t approve of passages that were too leggy and indirect; it didn’t approve of repetitions; and it especially didn’t approve of one-sentence paragraphs. A description of the situation in vigorous Caro-ese might read something like this:
“In the editorial world, William Shawn was a man of immense power. He wielded it quietly, softly, almost in a whisper, but he wielded it nonetheless. Not for nothing did some of his staff members privately call him the Iron Mouse. For writers, Shawn’s long wooden desk was like a shrine, an altar, and in the passing of proofs across that brightly polished surface — pages and pages of proofs, stacks of proofs, sheaves and bundles of proofs, proofs from the fact-checkers, the lawyers, the grammarians, proofs marked with feathery hen-scratch and with bold red-pencilings — they discerned something like magic, the alchemy that renders ordinary, sublunary prose free of impurity and infuses it with an ineffable, entrancing glow, the sheen of true New Yorker style.
“But that style was not for everyone.
“It was not for Robert Caro.”
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It’s not writing that takes Caro so long but, rather, rewriting.
- Charles McGrath
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/15/magazine/robert-caros-big-dig.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all
Write By Me
